It was a lovely early spring day in Boston, and luckily I was able to get out for a run and listen to talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was a thought-provoking discussion with Juan Gallego on neural manifolds on the Brain Inspired podcast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwXClvInHDk

Next was an interesting talk by Steve Chang on behavioral and neural mechanisms of cooperation in marmosets at Motivated Cognition Meetings https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQ2FN2l1HfU

Next was a fascinating talk by Deying Pan on 3D printing velcro and zippers (among other things) at the Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bts2OrhbmzE

Next was an intriguing talk by Haozhe Zhou on human motion sensing with flexible IMU placement at the HCIL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ud2yXGvqu4

Next was an engaging panel on the state of Latino entrepreneurship in the US at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business with Jennifer Garcia, Rosalia Zarate, and Marlene Orozco https://www.youtube.com/live/EHXHWvlmxWA?si=1vGgu3_hE17q2lFO&t=2625

Next was "Varieties of Impact Investing," edited by Philip Balsiger, Daniel Burnier, and Noé Kabouche. This collection digs into the world of impact investing, largely finding it wanting from a variety of perspectives. The entire space is admittedly fairly vague, which these academics jump on and interrogate is a number of noteworthy chapters. I especially liked Kabouche's investigation of Geneva's impact investing ecosystem, as well as the sections on Colombian social impact bonds (Natalia Gómez Muñoz), rural Ghanaian agricultural projects (Claudia Campisano), and impact investing in Nigeria (Elena Christodoulou and Shonali Banerjee). Even if you're a practitioner in the space, you'll get a great perspective on where current approaches fall flat and how to improve moving forward. Highly recommend https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/varieties-of-impact-investing

Last was "Low-Paid EU Migrant Workers" by Catherine Barnard, Fiona Costello, and Sarah Fraser Butlin. This book is an excellent ethnographic dive into the migrant worker community in Great Yarmouth, exploring their living and working conditions in an already deprived part of the UK. The authors come at this from a legal lens, but bring in interactions with area NGOs to demonstrate how many problems that are traditionally thought of as legal are solved informally by support networks. I do wish there were more macro statistics throughout the book to help ground the scale of the issues that are surfaced, but overall this is a unique, insightful look at an understudied EU expatriate community https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/low-paid-eu-migrant-workers